Merging Socialism with the Working Class Tenant Movement: The Future of Base-Building in NYC DSA
By: Laurel G.
The Liberator, March 1918 front cover
At a DSA branch presentation earlier this year, Green Social Housing campaign organizers were asked how they would engage rank-and-file tenants in their campaign. Their response was that they would “do base-building.” They did not elaborate, but likely meant the usual process of engaging with the working class base organized by their nonprofit partners within the confines of the campaign cycle. In all likelihood, they did not mean the slow and intentional cultivation of independent tenant organizations block by block over the course of many years.
How does DSA create a strategy beyond the campaign form and its activist base in order to reach the wider working class? How does it “do base-building” in a way that doesn’t tokenize tenant involvement within a nonprofit framework, but leads to the development of working class leaders and institutions?
DSA’s Independent Working Class Organizing (IWCO) initiative is grappling with these questions as it builds a tenant organizing structure within DSA while supporting a growing tenant movement outside the chapter. Its approach is neighborhood-based leadership development, with active groups in 6 branches organizing tenant associations across 5 boroughs. In addition to seeding new tenant associations and unions, it has successfully increased DSA membership in existing tenant unions while reciprocally bringing tenant union members and leaders into DSA.
IWCO’s most recent project is a monthly Tenants Circle, modeled on DSA’s Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) workers circle, which took inspiration from Ithaca-based Community Union Organizers. Community Union describes their formation in Labor Notes as “a peer coaching group that has evolved into a uniquely potent space […] that helps workers overcome their fear and learn to take collective action.” Established tenant unions like Brooklyn Eviction Defense have created similar spaces where, according to their newsletter, “tenants who have been organizing for years or just a few days, [put] their heads together, drawing from insights in their everyday lives, to come up with a plan to push back on the landlord and regain much-needed control over our housing.” These models de-emphasize activist experts in lieu of collective knowledge, resource sharing and leadership development.
As tenants meet together every month across class lines to share their building-level fights, thematic trends have emerged, revealing the messy day-to-day work underlying the merger of socialist organizers and the advanced section of the working class. Socialist organizers struggle to remain committed in the face of systemic de-politicization, atomization and disengagement. Tenants fight frustration and burnout when attempts to organize their buildings are not immediately successful. For this reason, tenants circles cannot only focus on immediate material wins, but must put forth a positive socialist vision for the future, where rent is canceled, care work is collectivized and the basic human right of housing is decommodified.
Although IWCO orients itself towards the political merger between the grassroots tenant movement and the activist group that helps sustain it, the reality is that building genuine working class leadership is an ongoing struggle that all tenant organizations face. The Washington DC-based Stomp Out Slumlords (SOS) is candid that despite their best intentions and the organizing momentum gained during the pandemic, they have been unable to build an infrastructure that is fully representative of working class tenants.
“We had […] envisioned that the line between organizers entering SOS from the activist side and tenant leaders entering it from the building side would gradually become blurred, creating a steady progression from active tenant to tenant leader to building organizer to trainer of organizers, [but] we have not found a way to contain both [the rank-and-file members and activists] within a single, homogenized organizational structure.”
Despite these challenges, positive strides continue to be made. Many IWCO-organized buildings are led by non-DSA working class tenants who are slowly making their way into its Tenant Circles. There are also countless stories of victories against landlords and connections between neighbors that didn’t exist prior to organizing their buildings. As the work becomes more centered in neighborhoods and aligned with existing independent organizations, leadership opportunities within the tenants movement will become more accessible to working class tenants.
By listening carefully to the motivations and intentions of tenants, IWCO and similarly motivated tenant unions can chip away at the skills monopoly of the professional activist at the helm. LA Tenants Union created a Tenants Inquiry Collective that does this by “drawing on traditions of militant research” and meeting with groups of tenants to “clarify both the aims of the movement and the kind of union we need to reach them”. In a similar vein, IWCO has discussed plans to hold writing circles as well as listening sessions at the building and union level to uplift the tactics, priorities and vision for the tenant movement from the perspective of rank-and-file members.
In order to bring working class tenants into the socialist movement, DSA’s tactical orientation must incorporate leadership development on the building and neighborhood levels versus an overreliance on a small cadre of professional activists. Widespread political consciousness cannot be achieved by the campaign form alone. It is relational and communal and built through self-determined action. As Stomp out Slumlords reports, they have been successful “in creating revolutionary consciousness to the extent that [they] have been able to cultivate people’s sense of community, solidarity, and personal investment through agitation and collective action, not because of the political statements [they] issue.”
IWCO seeks to positively influence DSA by demonstrating the importance of an intentional base-building structure to achieve its revolutionary project. The majority of NYC chapter members are tenants, so it is only logical they should organize their buildings, simultaneously strengthening their communities and the stability of their own housing. This will require a major shift as DSA is an electoral and campaign-centered organization that does base-building to achieve its legislative goals without a culture of member responsibility to build leadership and working class organization where they live.
IWCO’s vision will take resources which it does not currently possess. Chapter financial resources are primarily distributed via priority campaigns and there is not currently a method for base-building initiatives to access chapter funds. DSA needs to build a culture of local leadership development and rethink resource distribution in order to harness the collective power necessary to achieve legislative wins while building towards a mass working class party.
IWCO Tenants Circles are held the first Tuesday of every month. Tenants and organizers of all experience levels who are interested in organizing their buildings and their neighbors’ buildings are welcome. To learn more contact: tenants@socialists.nyc